Yesterday I moved from Natty to Oneiric. I know that some users are already running Ironhide on Oneiric, but was still a little excited to how easy/hard the process would be.

It turned out to be an pretty easy job.. but still not without problems.. those problem where not caused by ironhide though, but by a change to udev, or rather to the folder structure of /var/run..

The /var/run directory has been moved to /run and /var/lock to /run/lock.. Either the Ubuntu people forgot this in their update scripts, or something didn’t go as planned.

When rebooting after the upgrade, I was stuck at the Ubuntu splash-screen. It took me a while to figure out what was wrong.. but here’s a quick howto.. I guess you could do this before rebooting.. but else reboot in recovery mode afterwards (holding Shift to get into the Grub boot menu) and select remount the root partition. After that, drop to a command prompt.

News..
I have released the first version of Ironhide, which is going to be my branch of bumblebee..

This version features:

* Graphical User Interface for Configuration and Submitsystem.
* Tests build into the Configuration, should help us narrow down problems.
* Major cleanup, removed all content not related to Ubuntu.
* Updated VirtualGL.

For now there is only natty packages available. This is soon to change…

The Ironhide packages conflict with bumblebee, so you should be asked to remove the old packages when installing Ironhide.. If your having problems getting ironhide to work, please reboot after uninstalling bumblebee… and then rerun ironhide-configuration..

I have given up on supporting the nvidia packages myself.. The version in Natty works just fine, and if you want newer versions, I can confirm that the X-org edgers repository works great with Ironhide:

I know that I haven’t been very active lately, partly due to vacation…

I’ve also been doing a lot of thinking about the way that bumblebee has been implemented.. The popularity really surprised me, and looking back a LOT of things where done too quickly and implemented wrong.. All in all it seems like every bugs-fix, triggered two new bugs…

I also allowed a lot of people to contribute to the project which, with all respect to their work, at times made me feel like I lost control a little over which way bumblebee was “flying”… I think this also was a reason why I lost some inspiration…

What is happening right now is that:

A lot of the people who has been contributing to the bumblebee-project, is now starting over from scratch in one combined project: https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project

Right now, I have chosen not to contribute to the Bumblebee-project, and try some stuff out on my own… nothing has really been published : https://github.com/MrMEEE/ironhide, this will include a graphical bumblebee setup and probably extentions to bumblebee-ui.. This project will probably be renamed to distinguish the two.. but just to be clear, I much appreciate the work the other guys are doing and there is no bad air between us.. I just need some “creative” time off…

So, right now, yes… things are broken, both in the ppa and in the git versions.. I hope that the above efforts will solve this as soon as possible, and a BIG thanks to every tester, contributor, programmer and user of bumblebee out there..

Today (night) I finally got bumblebee packaged into a Ubuntu Launchpad PPA. Something that I’ve been wanting to do for quite some time now… At the same time I have introduced a new installer/configuration utillity. Basically with the same functionality, but it has been cleaned up and should be much easier to use.

Now what does that mean?? For ordinary users, that means that all the installation process should be a lot easier now for Ubuntu-based distributions.

All you have to do is run the following commands:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:mj-casalogic/bumblebee

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install bumblebee

Does it get any easier???

I’ve moved the version of bumblebee in the PPA to version 2.0, to indicate that this really is a major step forward..

Thanks to all for your feedback, I know that you haven’t heard much from me for the last two weeks…

So now it’s back to fixing bugs, but from now on, i’ll focus on fixing the bugs in PPA version.